He’S Transformed, And Passionate About It

Steve Scroggins abandoned marijuana and tequila for God.

One moment his hands shook for a mind-numbing joint. The next moment his heart pumped with passion for something his senses couldn’t define. It happened that fast.

“I felt his presence behind me. I heard him say, `If you want someone to love, love me,”’ Steve says. “I went, `Wow, I never thought of that.’ I went to sleep and woke up a different person.”

But he didn’t shut out his past. It rings in his speech every time he tacks “man,” as in “Hey, man,” to the end of a sentence. It sits on his neck in an unruly flip of 1970s hair.

It electrifies his sermons at the Coeur d’Alene Calvary Chapel with real hope and redemption.

And it lives in his art - thick, vivid paintings that shriek of anger, turmoil and triumph as subtly as a fire alarm.

“His painting is strong and bright,” says Allie Vogt, Steve’s art instructor at North Idaho College. “He puts a lot of energy into it.”

As he does with everything, as if he’s on borrowed time.

“Painting’s exhilarating, like writing a poem or song,” he says, speaking faster and faster as thoughts about his work overwhelm him. “Painting for me is very passionate. It needs to come out. Each piece is different. It actually speaks to you.”

Steve’s slashes, globs and graffiti invite interpretation, or even psychoanalysis.

He sculpts paint with a palette knife like a baker frosts cakes. He scratches words fingernail thin into bright streaks. The word “insane” hangs miserably colorless inside a purple stripe in his abstract, “Pain.”

“I guess I’m angry,” he says.

Anger has burned in Steve for nearly 49 years, since his grandparents embraced him when his mother couldn’t cope with raising a baby. His hillbilly grandfather couldn’t read or write, but knew guns and fishing poles.

“He taught me a respect for weaponry,” Steve says. “When I got drafted, I knew I didn’t want to hunt people.”

He wanted to shoot photographs. His mother had given him a Kodak Brownie when he was 9. Capturing life on paper fascinated him.

Steve joined the Air Force in 1968, believing it offered him a chance to learn photography.

It didn’t. He ended up guarding Phantom F4 fighter jets in South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam for 18 months. Guards were targets for slickie boys - local throat-slitters. Steve escaped, but some of his friends didn’t.

He left home a fresh-faced choir boy and returned experienced in women, liquor and drugs.

“You could buy a grocery bag of marijuana over there for $3,” he says.

The Air Force deposited him near San Francisco a disillusioned man. Steve married his high school sweetheart and divorced a year later. He accepted Jesus Christ through the witness of a born-again Christian neighbor, but didn’t change his life.

Instead, he moved in with a dope dealer who catered to Hells Angels and Hessians motorcycle gangs. Steve didn’t wear gang colors, but he bought a 1949 Harley Davidson Panhead, answered to Harmonica Steve and “ran” with the gangs whenever he could.

Life on the edge absorbed Steve until 1980. That’s when God reached him. Steve was 30, despondent over a breakup with a girlfriend and sobbing for help from any force.

“Chills went up my back,” he says, dropping onto one blue-jeaned knee to re-create the moment he heard God. “I dropped drugs, alcohol and cigarettes cold turkey and with no withdrawals. What a trip.”

A day later, Steve found himself in a Calvary Chapel. He liked the exuberant worship style. Church musicians played congas and electric guitars. The pastor wore jeans and a flannel shirt.

Steve taught Sunday school, then supervised it. He directed a singles Bible study, then taught the Bible to recovering addicts. He enrolled in college, opened his own landscaping business and remarried.

Through it all, he created - photographs, room-size mobiles, drawings. He had no training, just desire.

A friend’s wedding brought him and his wife, Trudy, to Coeur d’Alene in 1983. Again, he felt God’s tug.

`He told me to come here and start a church,” Steve says. “I said, `Wow, OK.”’ He opened the Coeur d’Alene Calvary Chapel in Post Falls in 1990. The nondenominational church attracted 150 parishioners and gave him new direction, via its computer. Graphic design captivated him and spurred him to enroll in an art program at NIC.

That’s where he learned the power of paint.

He doesn’t plan his pictures. They blossom. God explains some to him. Others spring from clear-eyed self-examination.

They’re Steve’s salvation.

“You can change your life,” he says. “A lot of people give up at 50. I’m just getting started.”

Steve’s artwork is on exhibit at NIC’s Silver Beach Gallery through March 9.